Pages

Tuesday, 28 February 2017

My mind and heart has not been devoted to blogging lately. I still like to read others' blogs and sometimes comment, but I have nothing earth shattering to share, nor do I feel particularly witty, or philosophical.

Snapshots of my life that you might see recently:

-green grass (not actively growing, but still green) is shocking for this Canadian in February
-equally shocking is sunlight - feels so unbelievably good

-me weighing my little piles of chicken on my nifty little scale - still logging all my food and eating within my calorie goals
-lost about 14 pounds so far
-have two or three pants (jeans mostly) that I have not comfortably worn (or worn at all) for well over a year - these are my weight loss goals

-shopping with husband this past Sunday - bought some used books to take on vacation, so it doesn't matter if they get smeared with sunscreen
-swearing a bit more than "under my breath" as I'm trying to get bathing suits out of a clothing rack and the hangers catching on every single strap, and then catching on the straps of the bathing suits I already have in my other hand... etc.

-me being proud of doing weight training about three times a week and being excited when I can move up to the next barbells because I am gaining muscle and getting stronger

-playing on the wii with husband and kids on Family Day and remembering why these are the people that I love hanging around with the most

-getting up every five minutes to let in a cat, let out a cat because they are confused by the mild weather mixed with high wind and snow
-letting husband know that there is a half of a mouse on the mat on the back porch and another half of a mouse on the mat on the front porch (disposing of body parts is his job)

-being just so busy and so tired at work and always wanting the weekend to come

-being reminded of Tang orange drink and then thinking about all the absolute insults to food that I was fed as a child, and then remembering that my father drank Carnation Instant Breakfast almost every morning - what was in that??

-driving home and listening to a radio interview with the man whose company is taking over some of the HMV stores in Canada (they sold CDs and movie / comic accessories) who feels that vinyl is making a resurgence.
-remembering the excitement of buying a new album and listening to it over and over until the words were memorized
-realizing my kids don't know anything about knowing the order of songs on an album, they only know individual songs

-staying up way too late on Sunday night to see if they finally found something on Oak Island and, no, they did not bring up a bucketload of gold coins

-going on TripAdvisor every day to read reviews about the resort we are going to and then realizing it wouldn't even matter if every review was bad because we are going there anyway

-sitting here at the "old" computer re-writing this for a third time because my crazy cursor on my "cheap" laptop continue to bounce all over the place and inadvertently delete most of my post and saying to myself, "You get what you pay for."

Saturday, 18 February 2017

The sun came out. We almost didn't know what it was!! We are above 0 degrees for this whole weekend. We all (daughter included... she just came home for part of her "reading week") were outside prepared to dig out the vehicle (long story). Once husband got it out of the snow, daughter and I walked back to put shovels away in the shed. With this lovely "warm" weather the snow has become perfect packing snow. So, her brother threw a snowball at her, she reciprocated (ages 17 and 20 respectively), I told him he still had work to do with his father...

Anyway, daughter and I ended up making a snowman. We decided to name him Stuart, after beloved CBC radio personality, story teller, and author, Stuart McLean, who just recently died.

Incidentally, Stuart McLean looked nothing like that.

On a different note, I am diligently doing my weight training. I do seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time pinning exercise pictures and information from Pinterest, than I do actually performing the exercises. I did however, come across something called "surrenders".

Here I am performing one surrender ;) If you think you are in pretty good shape (delusional), try your hand at these babies. I won't bother sharing how my first attempts went. It wasn't pretty.

I will finish with mentioning what is indeed a beautiful sound, here. We have a metal roof on our house. When the sun comes out, and the metal begins to heat up, the snow from the roof can suddenly toboggan off with great force. It is the beautiful, startling sound of snow slamming down from our roof that I have just heard as I sit typing these last lines. There just may be hope that spring will arrive in a few short weeks!

Thursday, 16 February 2017

This is a little late, but Valentines Day was quite nice for two tired people mid-week! We had both been working hard to lose weight, each doing our own thing, and we decided we would get each other a very special treat, exactly what we wanted, so that the splurge would be worth it. I asked for chocolate covered strawberries that I knew our wonderful local grocery store makes special for Valentines Day.

My husband wanted his favourite food : cheese. My chocolate drug of choice is like his cheese drug of choice. I bought him Stilton blue cheese and brie with a nice half loaf of rustic rye bread.

We both ate our splurges with complete and utter joy because neither of us had "cheated" on our respective eating plans up to this point. I even adjusted my calories that day so that even with the splurge, I wouldn't be that far over the mark.

I would have been perfectly happy with the strawberries, but we also had a bit of red wine. This is my current favourite.

The wine and the strawberries made me perfectly happy. However, my husband had a surprise for me that I wasn't expecting at all. During the day, when I was on a break at work, red roses were delivered for me! It has been a long time since he's done the flower thing. I was very surprised! It was lovely and they still look very nice.

I hope everyone had a good Valentines Day, doing what they chose to do. Some people think it's a bit of a made up holiday, and perhaps it is just a commercial gimmick to sell more stuff, but after 25 years of marriage, it was nice to know that you could still be surprised, while at the same time know that it was completely perfect to just sit at home at the end of a long work day and eat your favourite cheat food with your best friend.

Sunday, 12 February 2017

Well, life does indeed go on. I've been reading some blogs, but not really wanting to write my own this past while. I've been very busy with work commitments as of late, and since we were running the roads earlier this month, we've been homebodies apart from going to work and back.

Winter continues, of course. We had some freezing rain, though not as much as some areas. My daughter texted from the city she is in and described the ice that she saw there. Today we are under yet again some sort of weather advisory. Snow fall I believe this one is.

Yup, still winter. New snow is coming down, but not thick at the moment.

To interrupt myself, I just have to say that I think you get what you pay for when it comes to technology. I have had to restart this delightful little laptop in order to get anything to work while I have been typing this. Does anyone else ever have problem with their cursor (arrow pointy thingy on the screen)? Mine jiggles and jumps and then lands on some other spot and then when I type, it ends up putting words in the wrong spot. It sometimes has a huge delay, while I wait for it to respond. UHHHGGGGG! This is an inexpensive Asus computer. It is being a pain in the Asus these days!

Alright, to continue... being as it's Sunday, I'm the first one up, which I love. It also means that I am usually greated by this:

and this:

Opposite porches. They still don't really get along, although Scooter the Cat with No Tail would be fine with being friends, Sampson will have none of it.

You would think the older and wiser of the two gets to the cat food first, but no, Sampson waits while Scooter eats. There are two bowls, but there is no way he will eat beside Scooter. After breakfast comes the usual bath time ritual.

They are in two separate rooms having their baths. Which was working out fine until Scooter finished his cleaning first and proceeded to go into the living room, take a running jump to the back of the above chair and then onto Sampson's head. I get why Sampson doesn't like him. Sometimes he can be an arse.

Last night, I made a very healthy meal. I'm still doing My Fitness Pal where I am putting in all my meals and it calculates my calories. I'm also exercising much more and it is paying off. I've lost 13 pounds from my heaviest at Christmas time. Woo hoo! Anyway, the idea was sautéed vegetables (mushrooms, red onion, red and orange peppers),

it looks pretty, doesn't it? And I broiled this very flat, skinny piece of butterflied marinating outside round...

It looks big, but it is very thin. I put it in a ziplock bag with some soy sauce first. I was going to cut the beef into strips and then put everything over a bed of arugula. This is what we did, but I totally left the beef too long. It was tough and tasteless. To this day, I still cook beef too long. Probably it should have been under the broiler for just a few minutes. We threw a little feta cheese on top and it was still edible, but not the healthy gastronomical delight I was hoping for. And I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, of course.

I'll wrap things up with a funny picture, at least in my family's eyes. My husband has a "uniform" for working. Not the work that he goes to everyday and gets paid to do, but working here at home, whether it is in the shop, outside, renovating, whatever. He wears old jeans and a standard issue grey t-shirt. Always the grey t-shirt. He has many grey t-shirts in various states of disrepair. He also often sleeps in a grey t-shirt. This is a sneaky picture I took of husband and daughter in a city Walmart. She's playing along because she realizes this is hilarious. He is very excited about a "screamin' deal" on grey t-shirts and is deciding between two shades of grey (like it matters).

And that's about it around here. Enjoy the rest of your weekend everyone.

Sunday, 5 February 2017

Just a pictureless post to say I am still here, but not really writing. Yesterday we went to a city about an hour away for the funeral of the 19 year old daughter of our friends. There are no perfect words to describe that event. We picked up our daughter from university in a nearby city first because she wanted to attend. She remembers when the two to them played Barbies and jumped on a trampoline together.

There were so many people in attendance. She was in her second year of university, engineering. She wanted to develop better prosthetic limbs for people. She was a down hill ski racer. She played volleyball and basketball and maintained an incredibly high average in school. This was a girl who touched so many lives at only 19 years old. Imagine what she could have accomplished had she not died.

Her father, a sweet, funny, sarcastic, intelligent man, managed to play the guitar and sing a song for her, and then proceed with a eulogy that was both touching and funny. I have no idea how he did it. Later he told me that Kayleigh helped him write it. His pain, and his wife's, is so palpable.

The whole day, my husband and I were reaching for our daughter's hand, holding her, leaning against her while sitting on the pew. Our son did not have the same memories, as he is a little younger, the last baby to be born of our group of friends. We let him stay back, go to his part time job, but I texted him during the day and tried to maintain as much contact as I could.

They do not know why she died. She went to sleep and did not wake up. She had experienced what she thought was a seizure in December. She went to the doctor, but nothing came of it. Apparently with something like epilepsy, one seizure is not enough to diagnose. I'm not even saying it was epilepsy. Nobody knows. But it's something to grasp at. I am not religious. So I'm not here questioning a deity. I am thinking about the loss of what could have been, a life unfulfilled, potential that will never be reached, parents who both said in separate circumstances that they do not know how they can continue living for thirty more years as if their own lives have a finite end point. I am thinking about my own two children and how I've nattered on about the small, the insignificant, the ridiculous. I'm thinking about my own life, and my husband's. Are we doing the best for our own bodies to keep going and enjoy retirement and be there when our own kids grow up and have families of their own if that is indeed what they will do. And then I'm thinking does it even matter? Should you not just live each day as if it were your last and not fret over the salad, or the wine, or finishing the work project on time, or spending too much on a pair of boots, or whether the upstairs bathroom gets finished or not.

This is a girl, as her dad described, who sucked the marrow out of life. To watch the slide show of pictures in which she was laughing and competing and throwing her arms around a multitude of friends was bittersweet. So I guess perhaps what I took away from this, a lesson that Kayleigh has taught me, is don't postpone happiness, or joy, or fun. Seize the day. Go on that trip. Laugh at that joke. Give that compliment. Don't sweat the small stuff, as the saying goes. And tell your children you love them every day.

About Me

I started blogging because I started reading people's blogs and really enjoyed them. I have always been a writer. I've kept a journal since I was a teenager (which was quite some time ago!), I wrote stories as a child, and I think things through by writing them down and getting them out of my brain. At the moment I blog about my life without getting too personal. I get a little thrill when someone leaves a comment, so I try to comment on other people's blogs as well. So... go ahead... make my day.

About Me

I am a wife and mother of a twenty-one year-old and a seventeen-year-old living in rural Ontario, Canada. Join me in my journey through gardening, motherhood, living in a century-plus home, surviving husband projects (give me strength), and working full time. I love reading, nature, laughing, small furry animals, and a good cup of coffee on the porch (or perhaps a glass of red wine depending on the day!).